How to produce sustained revenue, joy and fulfillment from writing blogs ?

I generally do not write posts like this. I distrust and squirm at the start of a post like ‘How to’. I am making an exception because of a series of intersected events today in a bank. The events happened in a duration of 5 mins.

A banker of some eight years experience, based in Calcutta in one of the largest private banks told me that she finds the environment of the bank increasingly becoming toxic and soulless.

My friend and correspondent Pradipta called me and asked me to the check the newspaper where local police had fished out two bodies – son and mother who apparently committed suicide after much deliberation and planning. Bodies were found to be bound loosely with bricks loaded in a bag in the son’s body. The son was a an electrical engineer from one of the Tier -I institutions of India, aged 30+ and worked in top IT companies. These IT companies are clustered around the same marshland where the engineer and his elderly mother chose to escape from their bodies. Authorities suspect malignant depression behind this macabre suicide.

Pradipta also informed that Prof Rao, recent Bharat-Ratna recipient and a renowned scientist who is Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Science to the Federal Government of India, spoke on IT enterprises in two sentences with devastating consequences while contemplated in its entirety.

1. IT industry’s core objective is to make money for some people.

2. Most of the people are un-happy.

So, here is my ‘How to’ to fight this un-happiness using a medium called blog.

Axiom I : It is 10,000 times harder to earn 1/10,000th of your current revenue (/income) by writing a blog. So, linearly speaking it is 10 million times harder to earn what you earn today from your day-job.

Axiom II : The discipline, work and commitment is a million times more than the day job you work.

Axiom III : If you start accepting Axiom I and II and work for 10,000 hours without break for your blog (which means a year and a quarter) while being in your day job, your readers will be an army with you as a leader.

Niche and Choice

Unlike your job and many things you have done in your life, nobody had ever forced you to write a blog. Hence, it has to be spontaneous. Choose some niche / theme / topic which seems natural for you and you can do this without getting tired for say 5 years minimum. Representative example : Sachin Tendulkar and cricket.

Fear

Celebrities are celebrities not because they have anything inherently to celebrate about. Most of them are so because there are worshipers who are afraid to claim the status. They fear their work and everything and hence self-certify that their lives and works are inconsequential and worthless and not worthy of documentation. The best way to rule a community, group or even a nation is to make sure that they feel that their past is non-existent or worthless. Representative example : Indian History and some mainstream British historians. Our all epics are myths ( imagination – either induced by trance or chemical effect of cannabis Indica) and in no way historical records of real events. Get out of this fear first and study your past – your own past which you know best and in details.

Method of work

Once you start building a blog, you shall have a lover’s anxiety. Every lover maintains a dual persona. So in your day job, you shall have all the experiences but you shall secretly cherish that sometime in the evening, you shall have a distilled meet with your blog which will carry the essence of yours days events with your past and with more interconnections and crossing something broader and significant.

This will keep you more energized and you shall fleetingly feel what great writers and poets feel while they absorb experiences and transmute them.

Development

Please understand that 99% people working in the corporate media are just people like you – generally unhappy. They write or produce something not spontaneously and under deadline and various other factors on which they have no control. So their works are uni-form, bland, sensual, automated and un-elegant. Hence, quality readers are always in the look-out for spontaneous works and blog is such and perhaps the only avenue. Unlike corporate blogs, blog of an individual is a personal product – from conception to post and this totality can never be replicated by a product made by hired people. Blog like an individual should be individualistic. Be individualistic.

By-products

There are two ways a flower can attract foraging bees. One is to have such fragrance and colour that the bees come and stay. Another way is to make friendship with some early bees and making them messengers. Your blog is a like a flower – slowly wafting and bees are the foraging people in the Internet. You shall attract the first ones and then collaborate with them to get more people you like to be your ‘guest’. The final objective of a blog is same as that of a flower : pollination. Your readers, subscribers will cross-pollinate and there will be many things born about which neither you, your readers and others have no idea. The birth of a fruit unknown to the flower and the bee who made this happen.

As more ‘bees’ forage, you shall be having access to honey, wax, secured tree-hives, direction and many such valuable information which are much valued by other people. You can either deal directly or let other businesses use your place to put their notices (advertisement). This will give you revenue and income. Please remember – these are all by-products.

Sustainability

Sustainability is the most unsustainable thing in the world. It is rather an impossibility. So do not waste time on it. What you need to think are three problems

Am I able to ride the wave and deliver those ideas/tips/trends that my readers have not even be aware of ?

Am I able to communicate this properly ?

Am I sincere in terms of being a leader and teacher ?

You shall be sustained for next thousand years minimum, if that seems adequate. Do not believe me ? Look around all great teachers of humanity and see the sustainability.

Blog to Book

After few years, you need not write a book. Your book is ready – just collate, edit and a book is ready. This will be a distilled essence of your labour and ideas that have used you and others to sediment in the form of posts and then hardened in the form of a book. This can provide you revenue as people will be always ready to pay for mid-to-high level of organized and collated information. Representative example : Google

‘Drops’ and Collaborate

Drop greed, miracle-mongering, short-cuts and impatience. Collaborate. There are many blogs which are dying for your collaboration. Search, Lock, Engage. Rinse and Repeat.

3 years from the start……

You may or may not have left your job. You may or may not have got ‘sustainable income’. You may or may not have been able to get out of your day-job.

But….you have

at least 1000 people who feel that their day is incomplete without something from you

you can have coffee with people in many cities of the world if you go

you have influenced many lives and perhaps many businesses

you have many friends who will help you in your future projects

you expect to get at least $ 2000 if you ask for a donation of $ 10 where we take some 20% people will actually contribute. You may not exercise that option ever, but it is

If you have other skill, you have ready customers who will buy from you naturally

And last but not the least, unlike your so called celebrity who is a puffed-up, straw-stuffed and disposable human donation-box, you have achieved minor global fame. This fame is not anonymous but track able to each single person.

You have created a product that is branded even before the first word was written.

Give it a try ! If you have read till here, chances are high you have the propellant to start the journey.

Disclaimer : As a sincere, humble and truthful teacher, I have not achieved most of the by-products I mentioned and not in the scale I described. However, it is not my achievement or failure that is important for you. I have transmitted what the masters of this craft of various niches taught and demonstrated. I have just collated and repeated these. My achievement is being truthful and sincere in transmitting what the masters have taught me.